In Nightmares We're Alone (4 page)

“Macie…” says Mrs. Harris.

I continue. “My mom has a doll like that, with the weird eyes, and I think it’s a witch doll. It’s making me see weird things. I want to burn it like the people did a long time ago.”

“Macie, enough!” says Mrs. Harris.

“Thank you,” I say.

A few students clap and some of the boys are still laughing. Some of them look at each other uncomfortably. I don’t care if they’re scared. So am I. I’m always scared now. I walk back to my desk.

“Macie, where did you hear all this?” asks Mrs. Harris.

“From my sister,” I say. “She’s in high school and she’s really smart. She says in a few years we’ll learn about it in school.”

“Is it true, Mrs. Harris?” asks some dumb girl in my class.

“No, it isn’t.”

“It totally is!” I say. “You’re lying!”

“Macie, this is not something we’re going to talk about at school.”

“But it’s true.”

“Your mother doesn’t have a witch doll. There are no witches, and nobody is burning anybody for looking different.”

“They used to.”

“Well they haven’t for a long, long time.”

“Well maybe they should.”

Mrs. Harris sighs. “Go to the office, Macie.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re telling lies and scaring your classmates. Go to the office, and I’m going to call your mother.”

I start crying and stomp out of the room. Nobody believes me. This is what Beth wants. She’s toying with me. Little girls are supposed to play with dolls, not the other way around.

* * * * *

I don’t feel like playing at recess. I’ve been lectured all day about witches. First by Mrs. Harris and then by the principal and then by Mommy over the phone for a few minutes, and she says we’re going to have a long talk when I get home. All because Mrs. Harris made me talk in class. I wanted to stay quiet and do my schoolwork. She told me everybody had something to tell so I told her what I had to tell.

I’m sitting on the curb next to the hopscotch courts. The other girls are playing hopscotch and jumping rope and singing. Way out to my right the boys are playing tetherball.

The jump rope girls, they’re singing a new song they made up:

Good little dolly,

Eyes of red,

How many days

Till Macie’s dead?

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

I’m thinking about getting up and punching their cute noses until blood comes out. I’m already in trouble, so it’s now or never. I know how grown ups think. Whether I fight these girls or not, I “had a bad day.” If I punch them tomorrow, then I’ve been “acting out lately.”

Use your words.

That’s what Mommy would say.

Maybe I should. I have a big sister. I know some words. Words that would probably give heart attacks to these goody-goods and their prude mothers. That c-word Sissy’s friend used that Sissy told me never to repeat. Maybe that’s the one I’ll start with.

I clear my throat and I’m about to shout at them just as I hear a voice behind me.

“You really think it’s a witch doll?”

I turn. It’s Martin. He’s a year older but he’s in my class anyway because he had to repeat the second grade. Maybe it’s because he’s really dumb but I don’t know because normally he never talks.

“I know it is,” I say.

“Does it look like one? Like, black dress and pointy hat and all that?”

I roll my eyes. “No.”

He sits down next to me on the curb. “The real evil stuff never looks scary,” he says. “Wouldn’t make sense. If everybody knew it was evil nobody would want it. Evil stuff’s always pretty.”

I don’t say anything.

“My dad had a bird that told me to kill him,” says Martin all of a sudden.

I turn and look at him.

“My dad, I mean. Not the bird.”

“It talked to you?” I ask.

“Yeah, but it was one of those talking kind anyway. A parakeet. It would only say ‘Hello’ when he was around and he always got pissed that he couldn’t teach it anything else, but man, that thing never shut up when he was out of the house.”

“Don’t they only say things they’ve already heard?”

“Well if he heard the stuff he was saying, I don’t know where he could’ve heard it. He told me my dad was doing stuff with this woman down the street, like sex stuff. Seemed to be true too, because I went by the house on my bike one time and his car was there.”

“Gross!”

“Yeah. I told my mom and they were always fighting for a while. Then my mom went to stay with my aunts for a while and my dad wouldn’t let her take me. So the bird told me where my dad’s gun was. It said if I killed him my mom would come back and I could live with her. It told me I just had to shoot him while he was sleeping and he wouldn’t even feel it.”

“Did you?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t be here if I did. My mom kidnapped me from school and I haven’t seen my dad since. Heard he died a few months ago though. I bet it was that parakeet.”

I shudder.

“What does the witch doll tell you to do?” asks Martin.

“She doesn’t talk. Just watches me. I don’t think she wants me to do anything. I think she’s going to do something herself.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should definitely burn it. It’s probably gonna kill you or something.”

I turn away and look down at the pavement. I can still hear the jump rope girls chanting.

Six…

Seven…

Eight…

* * * * *

Mommy’s already there when I get home, sitting on the love seat and waiting for me in the living room. I take off my backpack and drop it on the floor.

“Hang it up in the closet,” says Mommy.

I sigh angrily, pick up the backpack, and put it away. I sit in the chair across from Mommy.

“Over here please.”

I make a big show out of getting up and walking across the room and sitting next to her on the love seat.

“Now are you going to tell me what happened at school?”

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t sound like nothing. Your teacher doesn’t call me at work for nothing.”

“Yes she does.”

“Enough with the attitude, Macie. You’re telling your classmates about people burning witches and your mom’s evil doll? What’s gotten into you?”

“Mrs. Harris told me I had to do Show and Tell, so I told her what I was thinking about.”

“Why don’t you draw a picture to bring? Why don’t you show them the new dress I made Kaylie? Why are you talking about witches and people getting burned? That’s disgusting, Macie. Where did you even hear that?”

“From Sissy.”

“I might have known.”

“But it’s true. She learned it in school.”

“Okay. I’m going to say this one more time. There are no witches. People don’t burn each other. A doll can’t hurt you. And frankly you’re too old to be believing this kind of junk anymore.”

I roll my eyes so far my head leans back into the couch cushions.

“Come here,” says Mommy, standing up. She takes my hand and pulls me to the doll room.

Up on the shelf where Beth should be, there’s just a blank space—a doll on the left and a doll on the right but no doll in the middle.

“See?” says Mommy. “She’s gone. I sent her back like you wanted. Are you happy?”

I look from the space to Mommy and back. “Where is she?”

“At the shop that sells them. I took her back so that some other woman with a more grown up daughter can have her. Are you going to stop all this nonsense now?”

I hug Mommy’s legs.

“Thank you,” I say. “That’s all I wanted, Mommy. I feel better now.”

* * * * *

In the middle of the night I wake up and Kaylie’s sitting on the shelf, not under the pile of clothes in the closet where she belongs. I thought of getting her out last night, but I decided to wait another day or two, make sure nothing strange happens now that Beth is gone. And sure enough, here’s Kaylie. Up on the dresser. Not where she’s supposed to be.

I turn and face the wall. I wrap my pillow around my head. I try to forget about it. I try to go back to sleep. Maybe I did get Kaylie out of the closet late at night while I was really tired and now I’m forgetting about it. Or maybe I’m imagining seeing her there on the shelf. The room is dark, even with the night light, and the dresser is covered in shadow. Maybe she’s not there. Maybe I’m kidding myself.

Except… no.

No, she’s there. I know I saw her there. And I didn’t get her out of the closet last night. I know that too. And what does that mean?

Kaylie’s alive.

Or Beth is alive and she’s here and she moved Kaylie.

Or somebody is in the house and he’s moving dolls around.

None of these explanations make sense and I don’t know which one scares me the most.

I notice I’m crying. I try to stop and pull it together. It’s just a doll, Macie. A stupid doll. A stupid doll that’s maybe not even really there.

There’s a flashlight on the table next to my bed. Mommy put it there one night last summer when the power went out during the night and I was too scared to get up to go to the bathroom. I could grab the flashlight now, point it over and see if Kaylie’s there, see if it’s just shadows in the dark playing tricks on my eyes. I could shine it around the room and see if there’s anybody else here.

That’s the only “logical” explanation, as the grown ups say. Sissy or Mommy wouldn’t deliberately scare me. So it has to be a maniac who escaped from a mental institution and broke into my room at night to reorganize the toys while I’m sleeping. It has to be that, or something “illogical.”

I grab the flashlight and shine it at Kaylie. She’s there, like I already knew she was. And one eye is blue and the other is green, like I already knew they would be. The only thing she’s doing that I didn’t already know she’d be doing is extending an arm, like she’s pointing. Pointing at my door. Pointing low, about the height one of Mommy’s dollies might stand if it were on the other side.

The door to my room is cracked. I always close it tight. Maybe somebody has been in here after all. A person? A spirit? A doll?

I want to scream for Mommy, get her to come in, but she’s still mad at me for what happened at school. I know she’ll wake up startled, she’ll run into my room, I’ll tell her Kaylie is pointing at the door, and she’ll get frustrated and angry and whup me and say,
“What do I have to
do
, Macie?”

I slide my feet out of my bed and stand up, holding the shaking flashlight in both hands. I walk to the foot of my bed and point it at the door. I look low to see if Beth is standing in the doorway watching me, but there’s nothing there. Nothing I can see from my room.

I open the door and point the light down at the floor. Another one of my dolls, Lily, is sitting there, legs bent out in front of her, eyes blue and green, pointing down the hallway toward the living room.

Doing my best to suppress a whimper, I put a foot out into the hall, a few inches from Lily, and I shift my weight onto it slowly, exiting my room. After a moment to steady my breath, I raise the flashlight and point the beam down the hall toward the living room.

I almost scream.

There’s a pair of eyes at the end of the hall, big eyes, staring back at me from the living room, eyes that seem to float three feet off the ground, part of an impossibly black face.

But just before I start shrieking for Mommy and Sissy, it dawns on me that the eyes are neither blue nor green but yellow.

Buster. Staring up at me from his bed on the love seat, curious what I’m up to.

“Dumb dog,” I whisper to myself.

So what’s Lily pointing at? If not at Buster, then…

The little blue and green specks reflected in the flashlight beam catch my eye. Susan. Doll number three. I knew I threw them all out for a reason. Susan’s sitting toward the end of the hall, pointing.

I can’t see the door from where I’m standing and my sight in a dark house might not be superhuman, but I don’t have to venture much of a guess to know what door she’s pointing at. It’s not Mommy’s room or Sissy’s. It’s not the bathroom. It’s the room I might have known I’d end up in the second I woke up.

As I tiptoe down the hall and it comes into view, I see that the door to the doll room is cracked open just like the door to my room was. If there was any question about whether somebody opened my bedroom door or whether I forgot to close it all the way, it has been cleared up. No way in a million years Mommy left the door to the doll room cracked overnight. No way, no how.

Standing in front of the door, I point the flashlight down at the floor and steady my breathing. I have to stay quiet when I open the door even though I’ll want to scream. I brace myself for a hundred pairs of blue and green eyes staring at me in the dark and Beth in the middle of the floor, not returned to the doll shop like Mommy said she would be.

Once I think I’m as ready as I can get, I push the door open.

It’s not as bad as I thought. Only one pair of creepy colored eyes looking at me in the dark, from the middle of one shelf of dolls. It’s no problem at all not to scream.

Before I do anything else, I close the door behind me as far as it will close without latching and I flip the light switch and turn off the flashlight.

I look around the room. Beth’s spot at the top of the far shelf is still empty like it’s supposed to be. It’s only that one doll with the blue and green eyes, some nameless, forgotten doll in Mommy’s collection, who is raising a hand and pointing across the room. It gives me chills to look at the doll and I spend a long time studying it before I even look where it’s pointing, because Mommy’s dolls are made of cotton and this doll shouldn’t be able to raise a hand even if she wants to. I mean, she shouldn’t
be able
to want to, but… you know what I mean.

I give up on trying to explain it to myself and I turn to where the doll is pointing.

One thing I didn’t mention about the doll room, it was converted from a bedroom and a long time ago it used to be Sissy’s room. The doll room is the biggest bedroom in the house other than Mommy’s, and because there’s so much space, Mommy wanted it to be the new baby’s room.